Canada 150: Arthur Currie transformed trench war
To mark Canada’s 150th birthday, we are counting down to Canada Day with profiles of 150 noteworthy British Columbians.
A corpulent rural school teacher better known for discipline than classroom skill, a failed speculator with dodgy ethics — bankrupted when a Vancouver real estate bubble collapsed, he covered losses by misappropriating $10,000 in regimental funds — his early claim to martial fame was restraint in the militia’s intervention during a violent miners’ strike at Ladysmith. All in all, an unlikely candidate for Canada’s greatest general.
Born in Ontario in 1875, with a reputation for schoolboy pranks, Arthur Currie moved to British Columbia in 1894. He took a teaching job at Sidney. He did not shine.
He joined the militia as a gunner in 1897. By 1909, he commanded the 50th Regiment Gordon Highlanders. He also sold insurance, investing in booming Vancouver real estate. The market crashed in 1913. War was declared. Currie conveniently left for France.
Military commanders often fail fighting new battles with tactics that worked last time. Currie, despite his flaws, was that rarity, a leader who instantly recognized that he faced a new kind of warfare demanding new methods.
Staggered and appalled by the First World War’s mass slaughter during frontal assaults against massed machine guns and concentrated artillery — the British lost 60,000 men in one day at The Somme — Currie devised new strategies. He sought to minimize losses with precisely co-ordinated manoeuvres, to take important positions and then hold them. He helped break the stalemate on the Western Front. Currie, it can be argued, sped the defeat of Germany, saving countless lives.
He planned a Canadian attack upon Vimy Ridge, an impregnable position that had cost a French assault 100,000 casualties. On April 9, 1917, having rehearsed relentlessly using the new intelligence technology of aerial photographs, 15,000 Canadians swept Vimy’s heights.
They suffered 3,598 killed and 7,000 wounded — negligible casualties compared to Verdun, for example, where 300,000 were slain and 750,000 wounded.
It was a defining moment in building Canada’s sense of independent nationhood. In 1922, France ceded Vimy Ridge to Canada forever.
The ungainly but imaginative Canadian general next captured Hill 70, holding it in the face of 17 German counterattacks, persevered at Passchendaele and broke the Hindenburg Line near Arras in 1918. Currie’s men won seven Victoria Crosses that day.
Currie was made a Lieutenant-General and knighted for Vimy. He served as president of McGill University until he died in 1933.